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Ethereum Classic (ETC)

Ethereum Classic (ETC) is a hard fork of Ethereum (ETH). The hard fork took place on October 25, 2016, as a reaction to the reversal of a hard fork that took place on Ethereum that undid a hack to one of the smart contracts running on top of Ethereum. The hard fork was driven by the ideology that a blockchain should be immutable and, therefore, transactions should be irreversible.

Ethereum Classic shares part of its blockchain with Ethereum. The shared history starts with the Ethereum white paper in late 2013, written by a programmer involved in Bitcoin Magazine, Vitalik Buterin. The stated goal was building decentralized applications. Buterin had argued that Bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development. He later proposed to develop a new platform. At the time of the public announcement in January 2014, the core Ethereum team was Vitalik Buterin, Mihai Alisie, Anthony Di Iorio, and Charles Hoskinson. The actual development of the Ethereum software project began in early 2014.

The development was funded by an online public crowdsale in the summer of 2014, with the participants buying the Ethereum value token (ether) using Bitcoin. While Ethereum was initially praised for technical innovations, its security and scalability were questioned as well.

In 2016, Ethereum was split into two separate blockchains - Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. It happened after a malicious actor stole funds, which had been raised on The DAO (a set of smart contracts originating from Ethereum software platform) and were worth more than 50 million dollars at the time.

The new Ethereum was a hard fork from the original software intended to protect against further malware attacks and to reappropriate the affected funds.

The part of the community who insisted that the blockchain should be immutable and that all transactions should be irreversible continued on the original blockchain as Ethereum Classic.

The future of Ethereum Classic was doubted, as all of the Ethereum main developers switched to the newly forked chain. The team continues to develop updates and marketing for Ethereum, which makes it hard for ETC to keep up. However, Ethereum Classic is still in active development (although the market capitalization is slowly shrinking in comparison to the rest of the crypto world).

A minority of users have accused Ethereum Classic to be a scam plotted by those who wanted to see Ethereum split.